A vivid look at the enigmatic Chiang Kai-shek

February 08, 2004|By Andrew J. Nathan. Andrew J. Nathan is Class of 1919 professor of political science at Columbia University and author, most recently, with Bruce Gilley, of "China's New Rulers," second edition.

Fenby shows a firm grasp of the complexities of the era, a feel for its shady personalities and a raconteur's delight in vivid quotes and incidents--sometimes too much so, as not every quotable incident contributes to our understanding of the subject. With a talent for physical observation, Fenby pictures people's physiognomies, skin colors, body types and clothes, and makes us see rooms, furnishings, gardens, buildings and landscapes. He tells clear battle stories, grasping the strategic situation and describing how the action unfolded. This is useful, because his subject spent the prime decades of his life presiding over constant warfare, although seldom near the battlefield.

Even for the old-fashioned genre of political biography this is an old-fashioned approach, a fast-moving political-military yarn populated by good guys and bad guys described in thumbnail, and punctuated by gruesome battles, tense confrontations, political crises, floods and famines. Chiang's life story is so protracted, however, that even a long book has to race through it--battle after battle, betrayal after betrayal, with the occasional foray into Chiang's mysterious relations with his famous wife, Soong Mei-ling, and the intermittent cold dip into his unappealing ideology. Some scenes pass by so fast, with characters appearing and disappearing into the shadows and acting without apparent logic, that they take on a surrealistic ambience. Heads on pikes, men starving in cages, prisoners bayoneted and buried alive, the fleshpots of Shanghai--Fenby's China is the familiar brutal Orient of movies and novels.

Not that the facts are erroneous--except for some that are open to question--but facts of this sort are by now well-known, while the untold aspects of Chiang's life and times will remain just that, untold, until scholars begin to probe new sources. Research in original sources will be needed as well to establish the reliability of some of the material Fenby uses, like the juicy but questionable memoirs of the woman who claimed to be Chiang's second wife.

Fenby will nonetheless have done good service if his vivid yarn reawakens scholarly interest in Chiang. The usual interpretation of Chiang's life is that he failed because he founded his regime on a conservative ideology and class base and was therefore unable to make the revolution that China needed. Fenby agrees. He also argues that Chiang was beset with more problems in a time of chaos than anyone could have solved. Another reading of the same evidence is that Chiang's regime collapsed through bad leadership, as the leader himself sowed organizational confusion, mistrust and corruption from the top. Newer answers may emerge from new research. So too, indeed, may newer questions, since the question of why the Kuomintang fell from power is deemed out of date by scholars who oppose telling history in terms of its outcomes.

In any case, I doubt future scholars will again endeavor to tell the whole story of Chiang's pre-Taiwan career in one volume, since the deeper the research, the more space it will take to address all the problems the subject presents. Nor, perhaps, will future scholars be able to open up the inner Chiang to us, any more than Fenby has. For all this book's consistent, close focus on its subject, Chiang remains an enigma, seen from the outside as a cool, disciplined hero in quotations from admiring foreign visitors, or as a sadistic villain in quotations from Chinese rivals, or seen from the inside in his self-serving diary entries as a resilient hero and far-seeing genius. With the death of Soong Mei-ling in October 2003, the last person who may have known what he was really all about has passed from the scene, without, so far as we know, leaving us the answer to the Chiang Kai-shek puzzle.